Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

There were fire-breathing lessons also, which I actually sent off for. The trick involved a wick (with potassium nitrate) and some hay. Like most of the tricks that really attracted me, it was incredibly dangerous.

Of course there was the occasional dud. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would waste good money on a wooden paddle with THE BOARD OF EDUCATION inscribed on it. Drawn on the paddle next to that motto was a cartoon of a boy bending over to have his bottom whacked. It was crudely drawn, like something on a sea-side postcard, showing blown-out cheeks and air rasping out of the mouth. It seems strange that an implement of physical punishment could count as a novelty item in the ’fifties, however jocular the presentation. I wasn’t tempted. My pennies went towards tricks and treasures.

When I sent off for things, I wanted to use my money, not to rely on Mum’s. I knew I had some money in a Post Office account, thanks to Granny. It was a shock to learn that I couldn’t take any money out until I was seven. To me that was the same as the Post Office robbing me. They had taken my money and now they were refusing to give it back when I asked nicely.

Seven seemed an awfully far-away age, well over the horizon. The way things were going, I decided my body was going to be dead long before, and I wanted the money before then. I remember asking if I could make an early withdrawal because I was so very ill, but Mum said, sadly, no. The whole thing was definitely a swizz. The next thing I wanted to do was to make out a will, so that the Post Office could be made to cough up after my death, but I was told I wasn’t old enough to do that either. Swizzed all over again, swizzled and reswizzled. It seemed hardly possible that a boy who couldn’t go anywhere, hardly even to the other side of the bed, could be ramped and cheated by the world in so many ways.

In the Ellisdons catalogue there was also a joke camera, a Home Hypnosis Kit, a ventriloquism course, some little worms which grew in water, a See-Back-roscope which showed you things behind you, a magical flowering shell, and many sorts of indoor fireworks: fairy ferns, snakes-in-the-grass, Bengal Lights and the star turn, Mount Ætna, which spat fire and sounded almost as good as the outdoor kind.

I loved the little mummy which wouldn’t stay in its tomb (unless you knew how to tap the secret hidden magnet), and the magical fish which curled up in your hand and showed you how much life force you’d got in you. If an Ellisdons toy didn’t do anything it was no good to me, though I made an exception for the Java Shrunken Head. It didn’t do anything but hang there, but it had had no end of things done to it to make it so small, which was almost as good. It would have been a nice spooky treasure to have hanging from my ceiling in darkest Somerset.

Jiggling her big fat bum

In the end I sent off for the whoopee cushion. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive, and the postman became a figure of commanding fascination, though I’d never given him much thought before. In the end, though, it was a bit of a disappointment. It worked a treat on Mum, who hated it. In her book the only thing which might be worse than a real blow-off (the family word for fart) was an artificial one. But it didn’t whoop for the Collie Boy, who had been the prime target all along. At first I thought Mum must have tipped her off, but I suppose you don’t have a career in education without some experience of pranks. I knew she was in on the joke because she kept jiggling her big fat bum on the cushion, and nothing at all happened. Somehow she knew how to disarm it, to silence the rubber lips that gave the blow-off its rasping voice.

My next Ellisdons acquisition was a trick camera, and I certainly got her with that. I asked if I could take her picture, but the camera was really a jack-in-the-box. When I pressed the button a toy mouse flew out of the apparatus and hit her on the nose. It was marvellous! Exactly as the catalogue promised. She fell off her chair. She didn’t see that coming! I suppose it was a prank that she hadn’t come across during her time as a school-teacher. It was news to her. It came from nowhere and biffed her right on the conk!

Her own sense of fun was wholesome and even childish. I remember her giving a little cry of joy at Christmas when she saw our decorated tree. She couldn’t keep her hands off the ornaments. She blew all the little trumpets and rang all the bells, rapping every glassy bauble with her knuckles to make it sound.

Dad always said I could wrap Mum round my little finger, which was a delicious image. I pictured a mother shrunken and made pliable, a plasticine woman I could wear like a toy ring or a sticking plaster. Dad himself was less amenable, and I was exposed over long periods to two female intransigents, the two styles of sovereign will embodied by Miss Collins and Granny.

When Granny came to stay, she would sometimes sit with me while Mum went out. She would sit formally facing the bed, elegant in a way that indicated long practice, the grace whose school is time. Granny had been sitting beautifully for years, with a steely poise not always designed to relax her companions. In Bach terms she was very much a Water Violet, except perhaps for the bit about her serenity being a blessing and a balm to all those she encountered. Granny could use her serenity like a jemmy. I showed her the little fish from Ellisdons which rocked in your hand to show the life force, or else rolled over or curled up at the sides (all of which had different interpretations in the little booklet that came with the fish), but it just lay still in her palm. ‘I suppose this means I must be dead ,’ she said.

Before she sat down she would inspect the seat of the chair and invariably picked up a long stray hair of Gipsy’s, which she disposed of without comment. She wouldn’t read to me or give me lessons as such, although she couldn’t help giving me a certain amount of schooling in her special subject of unarmed combat, or conversation as she called it. Sometimes she taught me tongue-twisters, and songs she called rounds. These weren’t rounds like a doctor’s rounds but special songs which you didn’t both sing together but in relays.

When Granny was coming to stay, Mum would spend hours cleaning the house from top to bottom, with murder in her heart, using the white-glove technique to find dust in out-of-the-way places. By the time her mother actually arrived she was exhausted. Granny would wake her up bright and early the next morning, fresh as a daisy and bearing a cup of tea, with the words ‘You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs, and we’ll soon have everything ship-shape. I don’t know why you insist on paying that girl. She’s worse than useless.’

Granny and Mum did everything differently, down to the smallest detail. When she passed the mirror on my chest of drawers Granny would straighten her back and raise her chin, while Mum cast her eyes down and to one side.

‘Granny’ has always seemed to me a powerful word. It’s odd for me to hear it on other people’s lips, referring to some irrelevant or ornamental presence. Certainly for Mum, and even perhaps for Dad, Granny was a thin grey cloud which would always blot out the sun. I remember when I learned that ‘Granny’ only meant ‘Mum’s Mum’ — it was rather a letdown. Somehow there seemed much more to her than being Mum to the power of two. Mum squared.

It must have been clear to everyone she met, as it was to me, that Granny had very particular reasons for being born, and for every link in the chain of decisions that followed on from there. Of course I can’t reconstruct her beginnings. The place Granny chose to be born is three wombs distant from me, and each womb is a wall of metaphysical brick which no mundane thought can penetrate. Each birth is an absolute new beginning (on the level of the organism, if not the cosmos). That’s the whole beauty and virtue of the system.